Fart Gags and/or Climate Justice Analysis

On a day when news reaches us of a shambolic and literally unendurable Climate Camp meeting in Oxford, and on a day when the Financial Times reports that the price of carbon in the EUETS is at a record low, with predictable negative consequences for investment in low-carbon technology, it's hard to find Reasons to be Cheerful.

Sure, there's the inevitable fart gags of Marc Roberts. But for once he is trumped (ho ho) in the RtbC stakes.

Danny Chivers [disclaimer- I know him a little] has written a very clear and actually amusing (no, really) summary of what is likely to be on the table at Copenhagen. More up to the minute than my look last June or so...

Chivers' piece is in the New Internationalist.

The wheel keeps on turning? The Issue Attention Cycle

Whether the Climate March on Saturday- trailed in the Financial Times, of all places- gets 5,000 or 50,000 (my money is on a figure slightly closer to the former than the latter), there's still a central question the organisers should ask themselves- “If the government could ignore 2 million in February 2003, why are we making this the central plank of our campaigning activity?”

And when climate groups in my (adopted) home town are finding it difficult to attract even the usual suspects to their meetings, let alone draw in new faces, then something is amiss.

You can blame it on poorly conceived or executed campaigns. You can say that people haven't absorbed Susan George's lesson-

“Give everyone a task. I had a dear friend who, until he was captured and sent to a concentration camp, had been a leader of the French Resistance. He was in charge of infiltrating agents into the ministries and public administrations, the railways, the post office, etc. He said the most difficult part of the job was not recruiting people- many brave French men and women asked nothing better than to risk their lives against the enemy,- but continually finding something for them to do. Because he knew that if they didn't have a task- even a not terribly vital one- they would drift away and be unavailable when a real opportunity arose.”

Page 167 of Another World is Possible, if..., Verso 2004

Or you can look to a thirty year old article about the “Issue Attention Cycle”.

In a nutshell,

“First, Downs says, each environmental issue goes through phases as its introduced and discussed.

Pre-problem: A problem exists, but only some experts and interest groups are alarmed.
Discovery and Enthusiasm: There is alarm and concern over a discovered environmental problem. People band together to support a solution and attack the problem.
Realization: The public starts to understand the cost and difficulty of making progress on the issue.
Decline in Interest: Because of this realization, there is a decline in public interest (and therefore media attention).
Post-problem: The issue isn’t resolved but there is less attention on it. However, the overall level of interest is higher than when the problem was discovered. This may result in small recurrences of interest.”

So, at the front end of 2007 meetings of various groups were pretty full, with the papers and airwaves full of the Stern Review and the IPCC 4^th Assessment Report. Over the last 18 months, from personal experience regular meetings/events have either stayed the same size or gotten smaller. (Climate Camp is an exception, for various reasons).

Now that the government can point to legislation (“world's first” legislation, no less), are we in post-problem mode? Will that make it harder to motivate, mobilise (and capacity-build) a whole bunch of people to get doing more stuff, regardless of how crap/uncrap our repertoires and meetings are?

Answers on a postcard to the usual address...

For interesting perspectives on these sorts of questions, check out Campaign Strategy and Great Turning Times.

Meanwhile, George Monbiot gets stuck into the Climate Committee's report-

“Lord Turner has two jobs. The first, as chair of the Financial Services Authority, is to save capitalism. The second, as chair of the Committee on Climate Change, is to save the biosphere from the impacts of capitalism. I have no idea how well he is discharging the first task, but if his approach to the second one is anything to go by, you should dump your shares and buy gold.”

Transition Positions

There's been a bit of a (non-violent) bunfight within Climate Change/Peak Oil circles of late, about the worth of the notion of "Transition Towns" (which are steadily metastasizing into Transition Cities etc). It's sort of a replay of the venerable fluffy/spiky, reformist/revolutionary arguments. There has been, as is usual in these situations, a bit more heat than light, and people talking past rather than to each other.

Venerable Brighton-based newsletter SchNews (the inspiration for Manchester Climate Fortnightly) published “Lost in Transition: Schnews fails to understand the language of climate group" a few months back, which I'm told was based on a piece by Trapese called "The Rocky Road to Transition" (I've only read the former).

And Peace News recently included a piece by Kelvin Mason entitled 'When Climate Camp Comes Home', reflecting on his experience of Climate Camps and Transition Aberystwth

Meanwhile, Sophie Andrews' review of The Transition Handbook, 'Transitional Therapy' was published in The Land magazine - Summer 2008.

Well, Rob Hopkins, one of the people who launched the notion of “transition” a couple of years back, has published a response to two of the above pieces in the latest Peace News... It's well worth a read. The following bits caught the eye of this cynical burnout hack:

“In the protest movements, we take up a position outside of mainstream culture, use language, dress codes, behaviour and forms of protest which at best bewilder and at worst enrage mainstream society, yet we expect them to see the error of their ways and the validity of ours and embark on a radical decarbonisation.

“What failed to come through in Mason’s piece, and in the Trapese piece, was any sense of humility, any sense that the answers might be found anywhere other than in their fondly-held beliefs.”

Hopkins agrees with Mason [quoted below] on this much at least;

“Transition calls for a different set of virtues: patience, tolerance, perseverance…. Above all perseverance. Transition isn’t glamorous or romantic, it’s a slog - more Sisyphus than Achilles: (re)forming community, building capacity to engage with lack of awareness, apathy, complacency, fear, hostility, bureaucracy, inertia….”

[the links are added by me, Dwight]

Do we have what it takes to listen to each other, find common ground and work really really hard to avoid the worst of the eco-fascist possibilities that become likely when the solid human waste makes contact with the air circulation blades? I suspect not, but it's a Pascalian Wager, innit?